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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

seeing as i can't seem to post in the forum that i currently support,
with this page and info that comes up

Quote:

You do not have permission to access this page. This could be because of one of the following reasons:
Your account has either been suspended or you have been banned from accessing this resource.
You do not have permission to access this page. Are you trying to access administrative pages or a resource that you shouldn't be? Check in the forum rules that you are allowed to perform this action.
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i'll just post here

happened to have this page open before the other forums went down and posting the info here in the event that all is lost

in the event that i cannot resolve the above issue with the new forums, my support of course will end,

and i'm not even really interested to begin with or being contacted privately about it, or anything else

Guy Dog is a minimalistic, elegant, innovative and full-featured puplet based on dpup. Its main goal is to be a modern battle machine that can compete with the official line of Puppy releases in speed, size and features: all three at once.

Its desktop is based on the wonderful combination of Openbox, tint2 and wbar, which conquered the hearts of many minimalistic desktop lovers and eventually spawned a new generation of lightweight distributions, most notably ArchBang and CrunchBang. Guy Dog joins this party.

Guy Dog was born out of frustration with Puppy’s growing size, decreasing functionality (e.g a browser, Xorg_High) and the lack of innovation in the never-ending battle against size. It rose from a solid infrastructure that automates the process used to build it, which means development is extremely easy and requires zero effort.

It is the direct descendant of Next Puppy and follows the footsteps of Puppy Squeeze, Squeezed Puppy and Dpup Exprimo, while combining the one-application-per-task philosophy pioneered by Zenwalk with the KISS principle followed by Arch Linux and Slackware.

It’s main features are:
- Completeness: Guy Dog ships with all applications a major distribution ships with, including a web browser.
- Small size: about 105 MB.
- Great speed.
- Rock-solid stability.
- Elegant and minimalistic looks.
- Built automatically, with strict quality control and optimization.

If you wonder what the name means, it's a pun on the term “guide dog": Guy Dog tries lead the way and show “blind” developers that is it is possible to build a puplet smaller than Puppy 4.x that has at least the same features as Puppy 5.x, include functionality sacrificed for on the Altar of Size (again, the best examples for this are a browser and Xorg_High).

Included Software

At this small size, you’d probably expect Guy Dog to be either totally outdated or missing important functionality. Prepare to be surprised.

Believe it or not, Guy Dog comes with all the functionality offered by official Puppy releases, at a much smaller size. It even has many extras, on top of the “standard” stack. All its applications, as mentioned previously, were built automatically using an in-house tool called “Builder”.

- Regular users should download just the ISO and either burn it or install to a flash drive from a running Puppy, UNetbootin or whatever.
- The “devx” module contains everything needed to develop and build packages. Developers and advanced users should download it, too.
- The kernel sources module is needed for experienced users who wish to build third-party drivers (e.g NVIDIA drivers). It is not needed in most cases.
- The build kit is required only if you wish to see how Guy Dog is built, build your own or just build a puplet using its tools. The directory also contains the Woof tree the latest Guy Dog release was built against.

Note: the Xorg_High package from Lucid Puppy is not needed and even incompatible with Guy Dog. It has its own built-in package, although the included demos (e.g glxgears) are not included. As far as I know, Xorg_High isn’t the root of all evil, but do not attempt to install it on Guy Dog, never ever!

When you download a big file, it is recommended that you use a download manager (even Firefox’ or Seamonkey’s built-in one will do) or wget (in the terminal):
Code:
wget -c http://path/to/file

This is the most reliable way to download huge files.

Once you’re done downloading, check the file’s MD5 hash using GtkHash or gHasher (whatever you have installed) or through md5sum (again, in the terminal):
Code:
md5sum /path/to/file

Make sure it matches the one provided next to the download link. If it doesn’t, delete the file and re-download it.

Screenies

Everybody loves screenies!

This is the clean desktop, screenshot taken on a live session. As you can see, it’s very clean.

By default, Guy Dog has 4 workspaces and you can switch between them by scrolling.

This is the desktop menu and some applications.

Interesting Facts

- Guy Dog’s desktop weighs about 350 KB in total.
- Xorg_High is about 15 MB and a modern browser is 15 to 25 MB - Lucid Puppy is about 130 MB and both are missing; if you do the math, it’s at least a 150 MB download, about 1?½ times the size of Puppy 4.x.

This is a pie chart (made in Gnumeric) that shows the size of all applications. As you can see, internet and office applications are quite big. They’re ordered by size - those on the bottom right of the legend are the biggest, while those at the top left are the smallest.

It is also worth mentioning that this pie chart is very inaccurate and doesn’t reflect the real share of each package’s size of the total ISO size, because it was produced from raw data that contains the total size of each package (e.g with documentation and locales), while most of this size was kicked out of Guy Dog ISO in the optimization stage.

Changelog - 5.0.0

Version 5.0.0 is the first version; it was released on 15th October 2011.

Usability issues:
- emelFM2 has the default file type handlers, which have nothing to do with reality.
- There is no wallpaper setter.
- Feh lacks support for GIF images.
- PupCamera requires gphoto2 and it’s missing, but the Debian package is simply huge.
- Xcalc, Xclipboard and the PDF converter are useless.
- There’s a non-functioning menu entry for Python in the devx.

Security issues:
- Dropbear is started by default, with root login enabled and the password (“woofwoof”) is widely-known - the wild fantasy of every hacker.

Changelog - 5.0.1

Version 5.0.1 is a bug-fix release for 5.0.0, released 20th October 2011. It offers usability and security improvements, but also some new features.

Bug fixes:
- Replaced Searchmonkey with Findwild, the former is not maintained and segfaults.
- Applied Barry's network wizard fix.
- Rolled back to the Squeeze repository for X, to get rid of all NVIDIA problems.
- Added libpython, GDB works now.
- Removed indexgen.sh, which generates useless (e.g inaccurate and ... useless) documentation.

Security fixes:
- Updated FreeType from 2.4.6 to 2.4.7, with a security fix.
- Dropbear is no longer started by default.

New features:
- catdoc, a small package that can convert Microsoft Office files to text files, very useful and small.
- Flashblock (an extension that replaces all Flash content with a “play" button that lets you decide whether you want Flash to make your machine choke) in Firefox, pre-installed system-wide.

Known issues:
- The old network wizard still doesn’t work - the fix was not included.

Changelog - 5.0.2

Version 5.0.2 is under development.

Bug fixes:
- D-Bus is now built with X11 support.
- rxvt-unicode is now built with more features, which make it 20 KB bigger.
- Fixed the broken krb5 package in the devx, a package containing development headers and symlinks was missing so Samba could not be built.
- Applied the old network wizard fix, for real this time.

Other improvements:
- The pptp and gpptp packages are smaller and built in Guy Dog.

New features:
- Samba.
- gadmin-samba, a GTK+ frontend to Samba.
- fpm2.
- Many packages that originate in Puppy 2.x, 4.x and Wary are now built on dpup; these include mingetty, unionfs_utils, unclutter, xdelta, numlockx, udev, xdialog, xlockmore and many others.

Work in progress:
- Initial work on a GTK+ Bluetooth frontend that doesn't depend on GNOME and Python.
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Last edited by Iguleder on Sat 22 Oct 2011, 08:54; edited 17 times in total